It’s not entirely clear what the naked Russian lady was referring to when she asked, in heavily accented English, “Would you like it?” But I doubt James Hudson was expecting “it” to include the highly graphic filming of the encounter and its subsequent posting on the Internet under the title “The Adventures Of Mr. Hudson In Russia.” Mr. Hudson was in Russia to serve as Britain’s deputy consul-general in Ekaterinburg, but his starring role opposite and under two local hookers brought an end to his tour of booty . . . er, duty: one portly bespectacled chap from Whitehall with his dressing gown hanging open quaffing champagne with a pair of Urals slappers going through the motions with all the flair of the mechanical hare at an East End greyhound track.
You’d think in a hypersexual age even the FSB (successors to the KGB) who are alleged to have set him up would have no use for anything as quaint as a Cold War “honey trap.” At a time when men can be women and parade down Main Street subsidized by municipal taxpayers (at least in Canada), surely life is all honey, no trap. But out there on the diplomatic circuit it’s a different world, and for an enterprising intelligence agency, the lonely wallflower at the embassy ball is still a reliable way to access your enemy’s secrets. As it happens, Mr. Hudson’s career self-detonated only a few days after the death of one of the most famous honey traps of the postwar era, the Chinese opera singer Shi Pei Pu.
Shi was a he, although for a while that wasn’t entirely clear. As a famous headline in Le Monde wondered: “Espion Ou Espionne?” Spy or spy-ette? James Bond or Pussy Galore? When Bernard Boursicot first saw him across a crowded room at some enchanted diplomatic evening in Beijing in 1964, the espion was certainly a he—a slip of a lad in his mid-20s but already an accomplished singer and actor, and socially assured. By contrast, M Boursicot was the French embassy’s accountant, a 20-year-old schnook from the wrong side of the tracks whom the career diplomats already figured for a loser. The girls in the typing pool called him “Bouricot”—“Donkey”—and not as a compliment. He was a virgin, lonely and longing for love. And there, at the centre of attention, was the glamorous young Chinaman, if that’s the word.
The categorization was complicated by Shi’s profession, for in Chinese opera the males can play female roles. At a subsequent meeting, the singer told him the plot of one of his great stage triumphs, The Story of the Butterfly. Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl who longed to study at one of the imperial schools. She was a gifted pupil, but, alas, in China girls were forbidden to attend school. So she makes a secret plan with her brother, who dislikes class and does poorly in his lessons, that they will swap clothes and she will go to the imperial school in his stead . . .
A few days later, Shi and M Boursicot met again, and took a walk in a courtyard in the Forbidden City. “Look at my hands, look at my face,” the opera singer told the diplomat. “That story of the butterfly—it is my story, too.” For Shi was born a she, to parents who already had two daughters. And so they raised her as a boy. But she’s not. She’s the girl he’s been waiting for. Friend, lover, wife.
More days go by. They’re at Boursicot’s apartment, and Shi strips down to her panties . . .
Years later, at the London premiere of David Henry Hwang’s famous play on the subject, M. Butterfly, I remember standing outside the Shaftesbury Theatre on a balmy spring evening as the first-night crowd spent intermission discussing not B. D. Wong’s or Anthony Hopkins’ performances nor the dialogue or staging, but rather the, ah, mechanics. The gay theatre critics earnestly inquired of the straight theatre critics whether any man could possibly confuse the sensation of anal with vaginal penetration, while the dour feminist critics rolled their eyes and the token bisexual critic flaunted his own extensive expertise.
But, aside from a few schoolboy fumblings in the dorm, Bernard Boursicot knew very little about the basics of boy-meets-girl—and certainly a lot less than those louche West End first-nighters. Shi, whether because he had a thespian’s eye for set design or because his masters in Chinese intelligence supplied him with all the right props, didn’t skimp on the details. After the consummation of their love, M Boursicot went to the bathroom and, upon his return, noticed virginal blood on Shi’s upper thigh. It required little effort to persuade the embassy accountant that “she” was pregnant with their child.
In 1983, when diplomat and spy were arrested in Paris, they were both taken to Fresnes, a male prison, notwithstanding Shi’s insistence that she was a woman. The doctors were told to determine whether Shi had or had ever had female genitalia. Answer: no. As to the genitals he was packing, he told Joyce Wadler, author of the book Liaison: The True Story of the M. Butterfly Affair, that he stood up and demonstrated to the prison medical staff how he could retract his penis and testicles into his body cavity and, by holding his legs together, make his scrotum appear to be not unlike vaginal labia. “Of course, one could not look too closely. It was only illusion,” wrote Ms. Wadler. “But 90 per cent of love, even a man of science will volunteer, is illusion.”
The French justice ministry was not so philosophical. They announced that the new Mata Hari was, in fact, Master Hari—a man. “It’s unbelievable!” roared Boursicot, lying on his cell bunk and raging at the radio. “It’s a lie!”
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